Farewell Blogosphere!

In the past two years our family has undergone several major changes. After 9 years of home schooling, we are in a public school; after 15 years of being a SAHM, I'm working part-time; and perhaps most significantly, we have been building our own house while living in the basement of said construction. What that means is my beautiful kitchen has been replaced by something far less lovely and I no longer have the time and inclination to make beautiful food. I miss my kitchen, I miss being hospitable, and I miss the blog. It stays up because it is a very convenient means to keep many of my recipes. <3

Stale bread

What do you do when someone does something radical? Like, up and graduate from grad school and get a job and move away?? The audacity! The XY chromosomal half of this couple used to have a standing weekly dinner date with us, at least for a few years until he married the beautiful and delightful XX chromosomal half of the couple. They even married in our house! And now, what do they do? Move to one of the most lovely places I’ve ever visited with topography, trees, a nice climate . . . sigh.

Denial doesn’t really work in the long run. Whatever it is you wish wouldn’t happen is still going to happen; you just look like a fool pretending that it’s not. No, a much better approach is inducing diabetic coma. When they come for dinner tonight I will feed them so much sugar they will be unable to move toward the door! Ha! If that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll just have to be all grown-up about it and say good-bye and hope they come back to visit. 😉

But here is Plan A:

When I baked Lori’s birthday cake, I made a couple of extra chocolate layers for tonight’s dessert. I sliced each layer in half to make four cake layers and between each is a chocolate ganache layer. It is frosted with a cocoa butter cream frosting and decorated with a high gloss chocolate chip/sour cream mixture. I’ve been known to add almond, hazelnut, or orange to various parts of this sort of dessert, but this one is all ‘just’ chocolate.

Next week we say goodbye to another couple we have come to love. That’s the hard part of living in a college town and being the ones who are staying. I keep hoping one day we’ll be the ones leaving for a place in the West, but until that day comes, we’ll just keep a supply of chocolate and sugar on hand to make them lethargic when they think of leaving! 😛

Our small group has quite a few food allergy issues which makes cooking/baking a little more of a challenge . . . but there’s little I love more than conquering a baking challenge. (I’d *love* to be a member of the ‘Daring Bakers’ and participate in their monthly challenges — if you don’t know who they are, go now to one of their sites and you can find all of them from their blogrolls. There are many more talented people in the group and I love to see the monthly postings.)

But this Saturday was not the day of the kitchen victory whoop. It was a bit more of the baking pbbbbtttt!!! I was avoiding several flours: wheat, rye, corn, and spelt, cane sugar, berries, chocolate, dairy, soy, and a few other things. Somehow I got in my head that I *really* wanted to make a cherry-peach cobbler. I made two pans, one plain peach and the other cherry-peach. I used my own canned peaches, draining off the sugar syrup and adding some agave syrup and honey, sprinkling the fruit with a little nutmeg and cinnamon and a little rice flour to thicken. That part was all great.

For the top I tried a cobbler topping made of white rice flour, canola oil, honey, cream of tarter, baking soda, salt, and rice milk. It was *really* white. It looked okay from the top when I pulled it from the oven:

but the bottom of the biscuit wasn’t quite done and the rice flour was so gritty, my mouth thought I had mistakenly used sand we brought home from the beach.

I was disappointed with it. Others must not have thought it was TOO awful, there were only a couple of servings left. Tonight I made the leftovers into smoothies by adding some yogurt, orange juice concentrate, and ice and zipped it in the blender. It was a little better but the grit was still there.

Lesson learned: don’t use only white rice flour. I think this would have been awesome if I had made my typical cobbler topping with flour, butter & milk and next time I’m going to try barley flour for my allergic friends!

I wish I had taken a picture of the success of the night, however. I made some peach sorbet by zipping a couple quarts of peaches in the blender with agave syrup and a little honey with some water and then froze it. It was tasty too. But I forgot the camera and then we let the remaining part sit out and thaw and then it wasn’t very pretty anymore. 😦